Introduction

More Alaska voters than ever are voting by mail or in early voting this year. This page tracks the numbers as reported by the state.

The data come from the Alaska Division of Elections website It’s a 10-page pdf, so I ran a script using tabula-py to extract the data. Additional summary information is available here.I have republished the data here, where you can download the reports from each day. I had a google sheet that was updating automatically, but that kept breaking. Other caveats: this involves getting reports from all across the state, so there are probably reporting delays.

If you see any errors, contact Ben Matheson. Disclaimer - this may not be fully accurate or up to date. It also may break at any time. This is not official or affiliated with anything…enjoy!

Statewide Early Vote + Mail Ballots Sent, Received, and Rejected

These are the raw numbers for ballots sent to mail voters, ballots receieved, and early votes that were accepted.

Mail Ballots Sent Mail Ballots Received Percent Received Mail Ballots Rejected
119,205 98,642 82.75% 524

Note: these numbers should match what the state has published here.

Overall Early and Mail Vote Compared to 2016

Mail Ballots Sent to Voters and Received by State

Vote By Mail per Alaska House District

Early Voting Totals Per House District.

Early voting started Monday, October 19th. Here are the raw totals of votes in each Alaska House District.

Mail Ballots Sent to Voters, Received by State, and Rejected

District Number District Mail Ballots Received Mail Ballots Sent Mail Ballots Rejected Early Vote in Person
28 South Anchorage 5256 6187 19 2035
33 Downtown Juneau/Douglas/Haines/ Skagway 3985 5012 17 2629
24 Anchorage - Oceanview 3945 4607 13 1833
14 Eagle River/Chugach State Park 3904 4432 23 580
26 Anchorage - Huffman 3728 4308 13 1855
21 West Anchorage 3640 4323 15 1786
22 Anchorage - Sand Lake 3496 4039 15 1463
27 Anchorage - Basher 3488 4110 10 1489
31 Homer/South Kenai 3429 4170 10 53
34 Mendenhall Valley 3300 4070 20 4225
25 Anchorage - Abbott 3262 3845 13 1690
18 Anchorage - Spenard 3004 3686 32 1751
20 Anchorage - Downtown 2959 3734 6 1811
16 Anchorage - College Gate 2843 3397 15 1261
04 Western Fairbanks 2800 3504 10 2419
35 Sitka/Petersburg 2605 3272 12 52
17 Anchorage - University 2583 3133 10 1418
12 Chugiak/Gateway 2541 3030 15 2127
29 North Kenai 2510 3039 19 53
23 Anchorage - Taku 2501 3017 14 1379
30 Kenai/Soldotna 2314 2780 13 29
13 Fort Richardson/North Eagle River 2290 2658 10 432
10 Rural Mat-Su 2276 2770 10 2006
11 Greater Palmer 2244 2687 19 3303
05 Chena Ridge/Airport 2181 2709 9 1952
09 Richardson Hwy/East Mat-Su 2137 2572 20 1559
06 Eielson/Denali/Upper Yukon/Border Region 2043 2407 6 567
32 Kodiak/Cordova/Seldovia 1890 2351 11 37
08 Big Lake/Point Mackenzie 1847 2236 15 2213
07 Greater Wasilla 1815 2272 13 3407
15 Elmendorf 1776 2205 14 724
19 Anchorage - Mountainview 1735 2166 6 791
01 Downtown Fairbanks 1725 2141 13 1506
36 Ketchikan/Wrangell/Metlakatla/Hydaburg 1710 2195 22 10
03 North Pole/Badger 1389 1688 7 1204
02 Fairbanks/Wainwright 1240 1493 6 938
37 Bristol Bay/Aleutians/Upper Kuskokwim 930 1189 12 81
38 Lower Kuskokwim 488 653 7 45
39 Bering Straits/Yukon Delta 395 524 4 476
40 Arctic 390 540 6 40
99 NA 48 54 0 0

Mail Voting Relative to Voter Registration and Voter Turnout per House District

For each Alaska House district, I have the number of registered voters (as of October 3, this report). You can see which districts are seeing more take-up of mail voting relative to their voter base. Additional this compares the 2020 completed mail ballots to the full 2016 election turnout.

This is not really finished yet. Also I just made up the regional labels.

Partisan Explanation on Vote by Mail

This looks at the relationship between relative vote-by-mail activity and voting results from the 2016 presidential election. The y axis is the percentage of mail votes returned relative to the total 2016 turnout. The x axis and color is the margin by which Donald Trump won or lost the district in 2016. The basic trend you see is that the redder the disrict, the less vote-by-mail there is, so far. The key exception is western Alaska (in the lower left), which voted for Clinton but is not seeing much vote-by-mail participation yet.

Voting Method Breakdown by House District

Mail and Online Rejections Per House District

About

The Alaska Division of Elections data is originally is published in a 10-page PDF that I parsed to extract the data. This uses a combination of R and Python. The Python uses Tabula to pull out the data. After that, an R script cleans out extra spaces, gaps, and labels the rows by house district and adds descriptions. I wanted to do everything in R, but I couldn’t get rJava loaded for the Tabulizer, so the tabula-py library ended up being more expedient.

This page is an RMarkdown document that calculates some summary stats, like percent rejected and then displays the data in several ggplot2 plots. The PDF parsing in particular may be brittle and this could definitely break at anytime.